‘To the Queen’: Tennyson’s Politics

Though Tennyson is often referred to as ‘conservative’, he was, like the other members of his family, not a Tory but a Whig. The disappearance of the Whig Party in the 1870s has caused its distinctive views to be largely forgotten. Without an understanding of them, however, it is easy to miss or misinterpret the significance of the political statements made in Tennyson’s verse. His two poems called ‘To the Queen’, one first published in 1851 the other printed in 1873 as the epilogue to Idylls of the King, are important expressions of these ideas. The first would be quoted (by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and at Tennyson’s suggestion) in Parliament during the Reform Bill debates of 1866–1867. The second is a troubled and urgently topical comment on the demise of the Whig political identity. As such, it suggests a political reading of Idylls of the King as a whole, in which the creation and dissolution of King Arthur’s Round Table has come, by 1873, to reflect the birth and death of the mode of government created by the Whig Reform Act of 1832 and destroyed, together with the party which had introduced it, by the new politics of the later 1860s.